Re-fashioning the Institution: Reflections on the Temporary Fashion Museum

The very title of the Temporary Fashion Museum is an oxymoron, suggesting some provocative reflections on the position of fashion within the museological realm. Rather than simply exhibiting fashion, Het Nieuwe Instituut's Temporary Fashion Museum hints at what the fashion museum could be, or (more specifically) makes a proposal for a possible fashion museum. What is the fashion museum today? What could a fashion museum become? And what can museums do to facilitate the way we understand fashion? In this essay, I will begin to answer these questions, placing Het Nieuwe Instituut’s Temporary Fashion Museum within a larger discourse on fashion museology and advancing some reflections on its scope and legacy. In many ways, the Temporary Fashion Museum is a moment to reflect on the dérive of the fashion museum, its current condition and, not least of all, its potential to enable a new knowledge of fashion’s frontiers in the 21st century.

Fashion in the Museum

At first, fashion’s entry into the museum was through the back door. Despite the many institutions now focusing their energies on it, and the recent proliferation of exhibitions devoted to it in museums of various kinds, fashion has not always been considered worthy of being collected in its own right. It was as garments that it originally entered the museum – conserved for the quality of their textiles, or for their cultural or ethnographic value. Behind this restricted kind of collecting lay a moral judgment on the capitalist basis of the fashion industry, and the denigration of fashion as a frivolous, female affair. Although this prejudice was slowly overcome after World War II and the advent of fashion museums and costume galleries, it still reverberates today. It can be seen in the difficulties that attend any definition of the ontology of the fashion museum — a process that perhaps raises more questions than it answers, among them: what are the specific qualities of a fashion museum? And which practices of collecting, conserving, studying and exhibiting should be employed in fashion museums?

Many scholars and curators have started answering such questions through an analytical study of the history of fashion exhibitions and the curatorial strategies adopted by past curators like Diana Vreeland and Cecil Beaton, as well as more recent figures like Maria Luisa Frisa and Judith Clark. They have arrived at some alternative contemporary curatorial practices that have pushed the meaning of fashion in the museum – with Olivier Saillard’s performances with Tilda Swinton being a key example – in a way that questions the very ontology of the museum.

Canons of Time

The Temporary Fashion Museum enters this discussion through multiple narratives which, in their various ways, disrupt the canonical idea of what a fashion museum is. Most obviously, the exhibition’s focus on time argues for the need to think of fashion in a momentary and impermanent framework, rather than in some permanent, solid form. While the title and limited duration of the exhibition recall such temporary conditions, what best evokes this character is the dynamism of the various sections and the objects showcased within them. These question the contradiction between the speed of fashion on the one hand and the notion of the museum as the repository of the past on the other.

According to fashion theorist Marco Pecorari: 'More than a fashion exhibition the Temporary Fashion Museum embodies above all a proposal of what a fashion museum is, or more radically, what a fashion museum could potentially be.’ In this essay he examines the the role of the museum as a place for criticism, the ephemeral quality of fashion and the position of the visitor/consumer.

The Now S/S 2016. Photo Johannes Schwartz

The Now section, for example, underlines fashion’s need to confront itself with the present by showcasing key pieces from the ready-to-wear collections presented in the main fashion weeks held in western countries during the duration of the Temporary Fashion Museum, pieces which were selected by fashion editors Penny Martin and Jop van Bennekom. The garments were changed accordingly to the season, becoming mirrors of fashion’s obsession with the immediate, especially with the moment when the industry is redefining new patterns of time and creativity.[1]By rotating garments every six months, the exhibition embodies the rhythm of fashion’s novelty by displaying the complex and empty meanings that innovation can assume in an industry which responds more to market tempo than to sartorial shifts.

At the same time, The Now part of the exhibition analyses the tendency to canonize time into specific silhouettes or collections, which then become representative of a fashion era. This tendency is reflected in the ways in which fashion histories have been constructed and showcased in museums, and the Temporary Fashion Museum leads visitors to question this mechanism.

A Speculative History of Dutch Fashion highlights the way in which history can become institutionalized, while denouncing the lack of a Dutch fashion museum and simultaneously reaffirming the role of museums in constructing national identity and style. In doing so, however, it also stages the controversial canonization of historical narratives in museums.

This particular installation therefore reminds us of the need to attempt to overcome static models of interpretation of the fashion system and to rethink its organization, value and creative hubs in space and time. It stresses the necessity of constructing ad hoc histories of fashion in which fashion designers may be less important than buyers, a pattern more significant than the final product, a jumper by Mac & Maggie more valuable than a piece of haute couture, and ideas of inclusivity more central than ideas of exclusivity. Such a vision of fashion history is a specification, rather than an inversion, of fashion values.

A Speculative History of Dutch Fashion - The House. Photo Johannes Schwartz

The specificity of the fashion discourse has been successfully pursued, for example, in MoMu (the Province of Antwerp’s fashion museum), which was created and organized through specific attention to national, regional and even ‘city-based’ fashion-industry characteristics. Founded in 2002, the museum was created to celebrate and reflect the avant-garde character of the Belgian designers who put Antwerp on the international fashion map, but it has also ingeniously employed the local approach to fashion in its own museological practices. It has been successfully modelled and structured to mimic the role played by Belgian designers in the fashion system in the museological realm, disrupting the more traditional formats of collecting and exhibiting fashion, particularly via an intensive collaboration with industry discourse and rhetoric.

New Model(s)?

However, the need to enlarge the spectrum of fashion histories and the importance of dialoguing with the different segments of the industry may also result in a lack of distance and the call for a more critical approach within fashion museums. Here, once again, the relationship between fashion and time becomes crucial, especially when dealing with the difficulties of ‘selecting’ the contemporary. Being geo-political entities, museums are defined by a mission and a collection which they must respect and which, more than ever today, must be promoted. Does this attitude restrict their critical vision? Are the objects collected forcing specific histories, or is economic pressure forcing museums to investigate ‘normative fashion narratives’ which will be more attractive to visitors? In more concrete terms, are museums’ missions still centered on representing an obsolete idea of fashion based on a secular fashion culture built on outmoded figures and practices?

Questions like these address the critical perspective of the public museological institution, an important consideration at a time when brands and multinationals like LVMH are not simply pursuing new markets or businesses for fashion, but are themselves becoming spaces for creativity and culture, instituting their own cultural activities such as museums, foundations, schools, and even talent contests. The analytical role of fashion museums is therefore crucial in moving beyond the adoption of canonized, celebratory narratives of fashion history, and in embracing new objects, new histories and new ideas of creativity that help to destabilize Western and centralized visions of fashion that are unfortunately, even today, built on an a-critical representation of the industry, its actors and its practices.[2]

The installation Fashion Data in the Temporary Fashion Museum follows such a direction, bringing to the fore the sociological and ecological consequences of the global clothing industry. Gathering data from the production process, the installation shows, among other things, the amount of money that Dutch consumers spend on clothing, the breakdown of the costs of a fast-fashion T-shirt versus a slow-fashion one, and the amount of water needed to produce one T-shirt. This consciousness of data aims not to be negative, but to instill a critical discourse in the visitor. There is an attempt to avoid overgeneralizing and simplistic moralizing about production processes in the different segments of the fashion industry. Fashion Data is a pragmatic solution to the search for new curatorial languages able to specify and create new models of representation capable of deconstructing the multiple shapes of fashion – from haute couture to fast fashion – in order to critically reflect upon their different modes of production, distribution and consumption, while simultaneously denouncing their dangerous liaisons.

Johannes Schwartz

A 'Material Crisis'

The need to create specific models of representation is also connected to a shift in the role of the fashion museum in response to what can be called a ‘materials crisis’ generated by joint collaborations between different segments of the industry and, more importantly, by digital developments. As fashion scholar Caroline Evans suggests, with the digital era the contemporary fashion industry has not only transformed its product (the garment) into images, but the images have become products themselves..[3] On the one hand, this has dictated the redefinition of many fashion practices, the emergence of new ones (including blogging) and the expansion of the spaces of fashion production and consumption.

Fashion films, fashion brands and fashion magazine websites, fashion blogs, Instagram accounts and online fashion retailing chains – these are among the many spaces in which fashion today is not simply mediated, but constructed. There is therefore a demand for reflection on recording and archiving methods beyond the conventional material archive of garments. On the other hand, the shift of fashion into digital experience urges museums to rethink their approach to their material archives. In recent years, conservation and accessibility problems have pushed museums to digitize their collections, allowed access to a larger public, enabling inter-connection with other collections and, most importantly, favouring a redefinition of their value in contemporary culture. A good example is the European project, Europeana Fashion, which unites 19 public and private museums and archive collections to allow digital access to more than 700,000 fashion-related objects.

At the same time, the growing need to digitize collections has provoked a loss in the material experience of fashion, in favour of an increasingly visual experience. Like the industry, museums have also utilized technologies in exhibitions in ways that do not augment the experience of the object by the visitor. The digital fashion designer Francis Bitonti summarizes this problem in relation to fashion design:

“I don’t want technologies that integrate with my body, I want clothing and accessories that make my body do things and feel things that I never thought I was capable of ”.

What this statement hints at is the entanglement of technology with discourses of sensibility in fashion, and the need for it to augment fashion sensoriality, rather than substitute it. In fact, as digital developments have drawn attention away from the properties of the material, it is today the responsibility of (and an opportunity for) museums as containers of material knowledge to re-institute and re-affirm material potential. While the digital has also brought important advantages to curatorial strategies for exhibiting garments,[4] and even in creating interactive online or Tumblr exhibitions, it should also prompt museums to revise their priorities and stress the role and value of materiality in fashion.

The New Haberdashery. Photo Johannes Schwartz

This topic is addressed by the New Haberdashery section of the Temporary Fashion Museum, suggesting as it does a re-appropriation of know-how and material knowledge in fashion. Developed by fashion designer Iñiy Sanchez, The New Haberdashery is an atelier where visitors can buy special textiles and patterns by Monique van Heist and Liselore Frowijn, and can also use sewing machines, assisted by several experts. Furthermore, there are workshops dealing with everyday preoccupations such as how to remove a stain, how to repair a garment, and techniques and strategies for reusing worn garments. The New Haberdashery not only educates visitors about the making of fashion; it also stresses the preservation of everyday cultural values and practices. The museum refreshes and reinstalls a lost knowledge, and combats the idea of fashion based on fast consumption and disposability.

Fashion Sensibilities

The Temporary Fashion Museum shows how museums should focus not only on garments as evidence of style, national identity or historical developments, but also on the ‘practices of the senses’ that accompany them. As Evans explained in relation to the reception of early fashion shows[5], fashion’s material knowledge must be always historicized, since the idea and memory of touch, smell and sight change through time and space. The installation Parfumerie du Parc, at the entrance of the Temporary Fashion Museum, alludes to this idea.

The visitor enters a room of perfume created by Alessandro Gualtieri, and while the installation plays on the crucial merchandising role of perfumes for the fashion industry, the immaterial smell welcomes the visitor with a different kind of sensory experience. As film scholar Laura Marks explains, smell is “the most mimetic of the senses, because it acts on our bodies before we are conscious of it”[6]. Similarly in Parfumerie du Parc, the visitor is stimulated from the moment of entry to approach fashion as a synaesthetic culture that is composed of a variety of senses.

Parfumerie du Parc. Photo Johannes Schwartz

While the use of perfume in fashion exhibitions has been a tradition since Vreeland’s curatorial practices, such a sensorial installation underscores the importance of fashion’s sensibilities, pushing the idea that museums should be spaces of conservation, education and the exhibition of both material and immaterial fashion cultures. This relationship is further discussed in the project Collected By, which not only problematizes the ontology of the fashion archive and the restriction of a collection, but also its related collecting and conserving practices. Occupying the first room on the ground floor, Collected By welcomes visitors with an installation of metal archival shelving units and green acid-free cardboard boxes containing the Swiss collector Eva Maria Hatscheck’s collection of haute-couture evening gowns, stockings and jewellery. Two conservators invite visitors to select some garments from a catalogue and then ‘consult’ the objects ‘live’. The visitor is thus catapulted into the archive and its rituals, asked to wear gloves and initiated into the practice of handling a garment. The visitor is transformed into an archivist and guided by the multiple epistemic clues of the garments.

By introducing the visitor to the practice of touching and handling the material, the installation not only reintroduces the practice of learning through touch, but also highlights the possibility of finding alternatives to the digital in enhancing visitors’ museum experiences.

Succeeding the garment archive is the archive of Paul van Riel, a Dutch photographer who followed and documented international fashion weeks in the 1970s and 1980s. His collection of overlooked ephemeral materials, such as backstage images, fashion-week calendars and fashion-show reports, are collected and showcased in order to stress the multiple materialities of fashion and the capacity of ephemeral objects to nurture the fleeting essence of fashion and its practices. As I discuss elsewhere, these transitory materials tick in time with the fashion clock, recording fashion sensibilities such as the walks and gestures of models, the scenographic techniques of a show, and the ideas and immense labour behind a collection. They allow the reanimation of ephemeral moments and the fleeting sensations of fashion, disrupting, in this way, the unstable opposition between the material and immaterial.

The Visitor as Consumer

While the first two archives presented in Collected By stress the importance of fashion amateurs and professionals in the conservation and affirmation of fashion, the exhibition’s last example of an archive introduces the commercialization of museums and the sell-ability of fashion history. Visitors are invited to browse a selection of garments collected for the vintage store Kabinet by Ferry van der Nat. Placed on racks and on mannequins hanging from the ceiling, the shop is rebuilt in the exhibition hall, complete with changing rooms. The installation blurs the boundaries between looking at and consuming fashion. Visitors are not simply asked to look: they are asked to try on and buy garments.

Collected by ... Ferry van der Nat. Photo Petra van der Ree

While the vintage shop in the exhibition creates a clear dialectic with the private archives of haute-couture garments, it serves to bring integrity back to the shopping experience. It forces the visitor to be critical and reflective about what fashion scholar Heike Jenss has defined as the ‘fashioning of memory’. Referring to practices of consumption of vintage garments, Jenss explains how old clothes are appreciated for rarity but also “valued for the time they contain or accumulate and materialize”[7]. Time here is not simply an economic factor influencing the cost of a garment, but is also staged as acquirable. In this manner, Collected By provokes a consideration of the accountability of museums and the transformation of visitors into consumers or, even better, customers. While installing a vintage shop inside the exhibition ignores the overrated and outmoded idea of fashion as art, it also forces visitors to confront themselves with a new knowledge: their own transformation into consumer. The context of the exhibition adds a critical perspective to the experience of the visitor/consumer, who is asked not just to consume, but also to reflect on the practice of consumption.

The HACKED Shop, created by designers Alexander van Slobbe and Francisco van Benthum, intensifies this critical perspective. Situated on the second floor of the Het Nieuwe Instituut, the shop sells ‘hacked’ pieces, derived from the overproduction and waste of the fashion industry. With waste as their starting point, the designers rework and assemble shoes, bags, knitwear and jerseys from disparate fast-fashion brands, repurposing them into a unique basic collection. As the two designers declare in their manifesto, their aim is to highlight the “cynicism of the fast-fashion industry and the overproduction that this system causes throughout the entire sector – perhaps even by the luxury brands”.

Hacked by Van Slobbe Van Benthum. Photo Johannes Schwartz

While this project works on redefining the role of the independent designer as saviour and activator of the “unfulfilled potential of the surpluses in the production chain”, it automatically leads to an exercise of consciousness in the visitor. By walking through the HACKED store, the visitor is asked to question the role of mass-produced brands, and his or her own agency in their production processes. The effect is heightened because HACKED takes the form of a conventional boutique, while forcing a different approach to it. The interior design of a fast-fashion shop is transformed into a minimalistic boutique – creating a discourse between the different practices of staging fashion – and ‘hacking’ is even extended to the sales staff, who become guides to the exhibition.

Consuming the Fashion Museum

In this way, the act of hacking fashion becomes the act of hacking the museum. It signals the contemporary inadequacy of its secular canons such as the author, authenticity and originality; and, last but not least, confronts the museum with its own contemporary commercial inclinations. Speaking of a ‘fast-fashion doctrine’, Van Slobbe and Van Benthum not only address the problem of values and the need to educate the consumer, but also redefine the practices of the museum, especially in the light of recent controversial episodes, such as the Musée des Arts Décoratifs’ collaboration with Swedish brand H&M in Paris. For its current (7 April – 14 August 2016) exhibition, Fashion Forward, the museum opens up its archive, which inspired the latest H&M Conscious Exclusive collection (the retailer’s ecological, sustainable line of clothing), which was then presented to the press in the space of Les Arts Décoratifs. Furthermore, in the exhibition the museum includes one piece from the new collection and one from the collaboration between H&M and Karl Lagerfeld, alongside pieces by Yves Saint Laurent and Hussein Chalayan.

H&M sponsored the entire exhibition, which is just another instance in the long history of brands’ sponsorship of fashion exhibitions, but the decision to use Les Arts Decoratifs’ collections as inspiration for a new H&M collection, as well as the use of museological practices as promotional tools in H&M’s advertising and marketing campaigns, reveals not a museum acting like a brand but a fast-fashion brand consuming the museum by employing its discourses and practices. For H&M, this is one example of its strategy of repositioning itself in the market through association with institutions or brands of a higher cultural capital, but it is important to look at the operation from the museum’s perspective.

The museum and its collection conspire to culturally relocate a fast-fashion brand which – despite some activities assuming responsibility for addressing sweatshop labour conditions and throw-away consumption modes – is still contradictorily operating and expanding its business through such production methods. While showcasing an H&M product alongside a haute-couture or ready-to-wear garment might actually be a fruitful way to explore contemporary dialogues between the different segments of the industry, the lack of critical analysis in the curatorial practice leads the visitor to confuse the different types of fashion production – and even the consumption of the showcased artefacts. In this sense, the exhibition conceals rather than reveals.

Indeed, it should be asked, do the financial difficulties of museums make any type of collaboration with industry acceptable? Or does the contemporary condition of the fashion industry require museums to build a critical position to educate visitors against its pitfalls? While fashion brands’ sponsorship of museums has been at the centre of critiques and discussions since the mid-1980s[8], the case of H&M and Les Arts Decoratifs opens up the problem of the new commercial imperatives of the museum. Indeed, the lack of public resources is increasingly forcing fashion (and non-fashion) museums to seek out close collaborations with the fashion industry, which has historically been open to absorbing or swallowing inspiration from other cultural realms. And, while collaborations with designers have proven to be fruitful curatorial tools in fashion retrospectives, the commercial shift that collaborations are currently experiencing may hybridize the cultural scope of the museum, leaving it less space to question what fashion is, and instead prompting a redefinition of the museum as an institution between commerce and culture.

Pumporama. Photo Johannes Schwartz

While the practice of ‘selling culture’ has long been subject to moralistic accusations about the ‘prostitution’ of museums[9], contemporary economic conditions have seemed to trigger a more critical stance in discussions of this grey area. This is particularly evident in fashion museums where commercial pursuits, like the gift shop so often placed at the end of an exhibition (as is the case with the Temporary Fashion Museum), clashes with the sophisticated commercial practices of the industry. But what if the fashion museum aims to be sellable? What if the museum merges fully into the fashion system of production? What if garments could actually be purchased in a fashion exhibition as the Temporary Fashion Museum seems to suggest?

Between Museum and Industry

Such questions can be seen as future challenges that fashion museums must face. In this sense, the critical attitude that surrounded fashion’s entry into the museum has become its strength. The commercial nature of fashion in comparison to other fields like art, for example, may mitigate the shift that all museums are currently experiencing: from ‘pure’ institutions of knowledge into commercial enterprises. While the commercial activities of art museums, for example, have been recognized, discussed and criticized[10], the potential of the fashion museum still requires investigation in this perspective. In his article, We’re Not in the Fashion Industry: Fashions in the Museum and the Academy (2008), fashion and design historian Peter McNeil discusses the problematic relations between the industry and museums, showing how industry practices – like styling for example – may become fruitful curatorial tools, while industry professionals may become fundamental in introducing new forms of fashion presentation and representation in museums[11].

This point brings me back to the starting point for this essay, the installation Now. Apart from addressing the issue of immediacy in fashion, this installation highlights the role played by fashion professionals as gatekeepers, even in the museum. Here, two fashion-magazine art directors become contemporary historians selecting silhouettes that represent their era, consequently raising the issue of agency and the critical voice. Who is allowed to comment on fashion? And how critical can such a discourse be, when it is constructed within the industry itself? This is the reality that the Temporary Fashion Museum embraces. Visitors are not only asked to view the exhibition, buy things in the shop afterwards, and participate to its construction: they are also invited to curate the exhibition and to deconstruct it. Here, the objects are not admired but they can be removed and taken home by the visitor.

What is at play is a performance of the fashion museum where issues of consumerism are not simply showcased but ‘made for play’ from a privileged perspective.

Rather than avoiding the issue of commercialism, the Temporary Fashion Museum brings it to the fore, problematizing its circumstances and engendering a form of meaningful consumption, rather than relegating it to kitschy practices such as gift shops. Provocatively, the Temporary Fashion Museum legitimizes the commercial side of the museum and fashion, through its institutionalization in the museum itself.

Museum in Motion

What then does a museum gain by being temporary? A simple answer would be: the agility and freedom of action that comes from not being a canonical museum with economic and collecting restrictions. In addition, however, the Temporary Fashion Museum seems to explore the position of the fashion museum as a temporary institution battling its permanent condition. To imagine a temporary fashion museum is not simply to problematize the ephemerality of fashion, but to reflect on the mutability of the museum as institution as well. Franchising museums in Dubai (The Louvre), ideas about shared museum collections, participatory curating and digital archives have indeed problematized secular ideas of museums which are today becoming obsolete.

Collected by .. Photo Johannes Schwartz

This becomes particularly evident if looked at through the lenses of fashion. Ontologically standing between the commercial and the cultural, the extraordinary and the ordinary, the past and the present, fashion highlights the contemporary contradictions of museums, provocatively suggesting that a museum may act like a fashion brand. As observed by Melchior, fashion in museums has often been used to attract media attention and to re-contextualize different cultural institutions. These are increasingly influenced and informed by fashion-production practices (and also consumption practices), as evidenced in the Temporary Fashion Museum.

This seems a paradox, since fashion is now becoming fashionable with museums for precisely those qualities that initially led them to ignore the phenomenon. In the exhibition Are Clothes Modern?, curated by the architect Bernhard Rudosfky and held in 1944 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the aim was not to be a fashion exhibition, to “show[s] the maze of irrational clothing” and bring visitors “to ignore the appeals of advertisers and fashion editors”[12]. The distance from and criticism of the fashion industry resulted in MoMA’s decision not to collect clothing.

In a perverse process, fashion is now appealing to museums exactly for its “maze” and capacity to “appeal” that have kept fashion and its industry practices far from the museum during the majority of the 20th century. Today however, the situation has changed drastically. In fact, MoMA has recently announced the exhibition Items: Is fashion Modern?, which will be held in 2017. As the title suggests, this not only demonstrates an ontological revision of previous ideas about what is modern, but also recognizes the shifting museological paradigms regarding fashion.

Re-fashioning the Institution

Considering such developments, the Temporary Fashion Museum helps to explore and critique the potentiality of fashion’s new attraction for museums, while it also highlights the need to critically rethink the fashion museum in relation to the shifting paradigms of the fashion industry. In this sense, the Temporary Fashion Museum illustrates the potential of an institution like Het Nieuwe Instituut to facilitate and nurture a critical attitude towards fashion in a manner similar to the ‘institutional critique’ which, in the 1960s, challenged the institutionalization of art. As performance artist Andrea Fraser recalls, the institution was at the centre of an attack by artists who criticized it as a space of control and governance of art, and aimed to expose “the structures and logic of museums and art galleries”.

Is it possible that the institution has now become a space for self-criticism or, to use Fraser’s words, for “institutional critique”? Enacting a sort of short circuit, Het Nieuwe Instituut shows how the idea of the ‘institution’ may be rethought today and transformed into what art critic Francesco Bonami suggested in his critique to the role of museums in XXI century.[13]

"A contemporary institution should be a temporary point of transit for visions that may also contradict its identity, and which can, in their contradictions, take part in the inevitable and necessary process of transformation."[14]

Such words resonates in the experience of the Temporary Fashion Museum at Het Nieuwe Instituut, which shows how the ‘institution’ may now be re-thought, transformed, or (better yet) re-fashioned into an agile structure able to resist ‘institutionalization’. Such a paradox couples with the oxymoronic attempt of the Temporary Fashion Museum which – lacking a collection and other restrictive museological traits – is able to disrupt the canons of time in the museum as well as ideas of what a fashion museum should or should not be. It seems to suggest the importance of thinking of multiple fashion museums, able to specify their languages and approaches to the phenomenon, while also fostering themselves through collaboration and networking with other museums and different segments of the industry, reminding us of the importance of critically engaging with them.

Notes

[2] An example could be seen in the exhibition Fashion Mix. Mode d’ici. Créateurs d’ailleurs, curated by Olivier Saillard and held at the Musée de l’Histoire de l’Immigration – 9th December 2014 – 28 June 2015. Here notions of immigration (also due to the location of the exhibition) were often blended with the simple commercial practices of fashion designers coming to Paris simply to show their collection. Furthermore, the exhibition seemed to perpetuate the 19th-century myth of Paris as epicenter of culture and art via specific curatorial practices, rather than problematize ideas of national identity and creativity in fashion.

Fashion has quietly renewed the very idea of renewal by constantly selling the past as a future, thereby framing current reality. This contrasts sharply with the idea that renewal always stems from technological innovation.